This invention relates in general to the field of medical devices, more particularly, this invention relates to a medical catheter having a substantially spear shaped tip.
Catheters are well known in the medical field. The typical procedure for inserting a catheter into a patient is to first feed a guide wire into the patient until the distal end of the guide wire has reached a target location inside the patient, for example, a portion of a blood vessel that has a stenosis. Once the guide wire is in place, a catheter is feed through the proximal end of the guide wire. The catheter is then feed into the patient and tracked along the guide wire until the catheter has also reached the target location.
There are two main ways by which catheters track over a guide wire, the first is an xe2x80x9cover-the-wirexe2x80x9d design in which the guide wire lumen extends from approximately the far distal tip of the catheter to the far proximal end. The second is a monorail also referred to as a rapid-exchange system where the guide wire lumen is shorter (typically much shorter) than the length of the catheter.
Most catheters in use today use a tapered tip in order to follow a guide wire through an artery. Due to the relative bluntness of the tip, even the very best formed tips may have trouble crossing obstacles such as stents, occlusions or tight turns located in the artery. This presents a problem in medical procedures were as one example, a stenosis may have developed in an artery where a stent placed in a previous procedure needs to be crossed in order to get to the stenosis. A need thus exists in the art for a catheter, which can minimize the above-mentioned problem.